This will be great for pharmaceutical profits, not so great for insurance premiums.
Probably not very good for patients either.
U.S. to make More Drugs Easily Available, Cutting Role Doctors Play
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Re: U.S. to make More Drugs Easily Available, Cutting Role Doctors Play
#12Similar to this idea, the province of Alberta in Canada allows pharmacists to write prescriptions for patients with only the only limit that they can't prescribe controlled substances.
Presumably only for trivial conditions id hope. Edit it will also lead to over prescribing of antibiotics and cause drug resistance to rise
I'd actually hope not. Many people have chronic conditions which require periodic visits to a doctor mainly for the same prescription to be renewed. A doctor should absolutely be involved in follow-up management, but don't make patients go every two or three months just to get the same prescription as last time and to get insurance to cover the meds.
Once a chronic but potentially well-managed condition is diagnosed, let people record their blood pressure, blood sugar, weight, and whatever and submit it for records. Let them renew their prescription with the pharmacy without spending hours finding an appointment that then takes hours to actually be seen. If their condition hasn't changed, once or twice a year with the doctor should be plenty.
Re: U.S. to make More Drugs Easily Available, Cutting Role Doctors Play
#13This will be great for pharmaceutical profits, not so great for insurance premiums.
I think if anything this would slightly lower insurance premiums, since insurance generally doesn't cover nonprescription medications.
As for the effect on pharmaceutical companies, it could go either way. On one hand, it makes it much easier for customers to buy them. On the other, the customer is paying for it out of pocket, and the price is right there on the box. If there are multiple drugs that treat the same condition, customers will take into account price when choosing which one to buy, and so you'll start to see the effects of a free market encouraging competition and driving down prices. Of course, if there isn't any competition for that drug category they can make the price whatever they want and the poor will wind up screwed.
Re: U.S. to make More Drugs Easily Available, Cutting Role Doctors Play
#14This will be great for pharmaceutical profits, not so great for insurance premiums.
You have that 100% backwards.
Insurance premiums will go down since OTC drugs are not covered by insurance. Pharmaceutical profits will also go down because people are much more price sensitive for OTC drugs, so they can't charge as much.
Re: U.S. to make More Drugs Easily Available, Cutting Role Doctors Play
#15This will be great for pharmaceutical profits, not so great for insurance premiums.
Why wouldn't it have the opposite effect?
Patients aren't price sensitive when their insurance provider is paying. It creates a suboptimal three (or four) party pricing problem.
It seems like it would be preferable if patients chose whether to follow a physician's instructions based on whether they got sufficient utility or quality of life improvements from the pharmaceutical to justify the cost. Likewise, if patients incur lower costs on the insurance provider their business is more valuable, and competing insurance providers will try to undercut them resulting in lower prices.
The only "loser" in this scenario seems to be the pharmaceutical companies, which will come in the form of a combination of short term reduced shareholder profits, and long term slower pharmaceutical research. However, it is not difficult to argue that if drug expenditures are too high, it ultimately comes down to paying the bills for over investment in research rather than the cost of production.
Re: U.S. to make More Drugs Easily Available, Cutting Role Doctors Play
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
The medical changes in the US take forever for change to occur. Even if greater access to some of these common medications is to happen, it will take close to a decade or more to see it meaningfully impact the industry. There will likely be a few drugs that become available before that, but likely not many and not enough to change the cost basis much. The US medical and pharmaceutical community is a very powerful pol…
I'd be pretty shocked if the pharmaceutical industry is against this. I would bet they _lobbied_ for it. They can already advertise direct to consumers, now those consumers will be able to go directly to purchasing medication with no intermediary (no "ask your doctor if X is right for you"). This seems like it's GREAT for them. I would expect marketing budgets to go up dramatically in pursuit of these disintermediate…
It's not as great as you think for the pharmaceutical industry. They can't charge as much for OTC drugs because people won't pay for it.
If the drug (or a similar in class competitor) is available OTC then they also can't charge as much via prescription.
So both ways, prices go down.
Re: U.S. to make More Drugs Easily Available, Cutting Role Doctors Play
#17I think this is good. For many people a lot of the costs are the doctor visits. Look at the Walmart 100 common generics for $4. I wouldn't be surprised if 50% of the hospital visits can be solved by one of these generics but then we add an expensive doctor visit to get a $4 medicine. There needs to be a more affordable solution.
> I wouldn't be surprised if 50% of the hospital visits can be solved by one of these generics but then we add an expensive doctor visit to get a $4 medicine.
Its really not surprising that the expensive part isn't the drug but the expertise to select the correct drug; it's true in lots of fields that the equipment or consumables aren't nearly as expensive as the brain to choose which of those to use and how.
Bits are a lot less expensive than the software engineers that arrange them.
Re: U.S. to make More Drugs Easily Available, Cutting Role Doctors Play
#18Nurse practitioners are already great for when you just have an infection and need some anti-biotics. They have little clinics with them in many drugstores these days.
Re: U.S. to make More Drugs Easily Available, Cutting Role Doctors Play
#19I have mixed feelings about this, especially considering the US is the only first world country where direct-to-consumer marketing is allowed for medications.
Bypassing the prescription requirement is of course of significant value to drug companies, who expend quite a bit of resources to sway doctors with free lunches, conferences and soft persuasion tactics.
Usually I welcome the freedom to chose but this doesn't increase availability: the bottleneck is not with the doctors, it's with pricing. Drug prices aren't going to go down with this measure, and will remain 3-5x the price of the exact same meds sold in Europe.
Re: U.S. to make More Drugs Easily Available, Cutting Role Doctors Play
#20Nurse practitioners are already great for when you just have an infection and need some anti-biotics. They have little clinics with them in many drugstores these days.
NPs can already prescribe drugs (just not narcotics, iirc).